MakerFaire NYC 2011 is this weekend. It’s a breathtakingly big event that’s equal parts science fair, renn fayre, and trade show from the near future. In a recent interview with Dale Dougherty Anil Dash spoke eloquently about the positive political meaning embodied in the “Maker Movement”, how it focuses us away from the conflict that’s so common in our culture towards the shared desire to figure out “what our country’s going to be when we grow up”.
From that sublime sentiment to the gloriously geeky opportunity to get my hands on the new Makerbot MK7 Stepstruder and the brand new 1.0 version of the Arduino IDE I’ve seen Massimo, David, and Tom working on frantically around ITP this week, I’m very proud to be participating in the Faire.
I’ll be giving two talks at MakeFaire this weekend. I’ll be presenting the Kinect Abnormal Movement Assessment System at the Health 2.0 tent. I’ll explain how the project came about, do my best to describe some of the science behind how it might be able to help, and announce some progress and plans for the near future (we have an intern!). This session will be Saturday morning at 11am.
I’m also be teaching a tutorial session at the ITP Cafe later in the day, starting at 4:30pm. I’ll cover an introduction to using the Kinect for skeleton tracking in Processing and a give little background about how it works. It’s a mini preview of some of the topics in my book.
Whether you’re geeking out or glorying in democratic optimism, I’ll hope to see you there!